the Blog

Zebra Fact Check isn’t likely to publish any new fact check material for about three weeks. We’re getting caught up on some neglected projects and exploring ways to increase our impact. We believe as strongly as ever it will benefit the American media landscape greatly to have a reliable fact-check source that isn’t blind to the conservative viewpoint. If you…Read more

Last year, the Cleveland Plain Dealer stopped publishing stories under the PolitiFact Ohio banner. We read with interest the criticisms of PolitiFact coming from Plain Dealer staffers. On June 7, 2014 Plain Dealer reader representative Ted Diadiun lauded the start of the paper’s Truth in Numbers fact check effort. He told how the Truth in Numbers system improved on PolitiFact’s…Read more

Did Will McAvoy’s speech on “The Newsroom” make sense? We’ve looked forward to surpassing the transparency of more established fact check sites by regularly answering the best criticisms we receive. Sadly, we haven’t had much to work with over the first year or so. We’ve decided to begin highlighting criticism by replying to a critique from “Arseny.” Arseny objected to…Read more

Announcing a fact check series on the DNC’s “Your Republican Uncle.” Sometimes fact checks just fall into our lap. Other times we have to hunt for interesting statements to check. We give thanks to the Democratic National Committee for sponsoring a set of talking points meant to answer conservative family members during the holidays. The site, under the title “Your…Read more

This site has joined the Report an Error Alliance. Members agree to prominently post reminders for readers to report any errors they see. That reminder helps remind readers, in turn, that the site’s proprietors value accuracy. The Alliance encourages members to download and use its icons. We’ve taken the liberty of modifying an icon (the originals come from Mignon Khargie)…Read more

Last week we published a fact check of President Obama’s claim that the vast majority of Muslims reject the extremist terrorist ideology. The president described that ideology as seeing the U.S. in conflict with Islam and viewing violence against civilians as a fitting response to that conflict. The president also stated that Muslims make up the group most often victimized…Read more

Pardon the “Sound of Music” pun. The liberal blogosphere is once again agog at the inadequacy of PolitiFact’s rating system. Tennis great Martina Navratilova claimed 29 states lack legal protections against job discrimination over sexual orientation. Specifically, she stated a person could be fired for either being gay or simply because the boss thinks they’re gay. PolitiFact noted a few…Read more

To help pursue the aim of educating readers about the workings of logic and rhetoric and to help make the rating system less daunting and mysterious, we’ve updated the rating system page to include an example of each icon we might use. When we add a new icon we’ll add the image to the rating system page. Each of the…Read more

We’re adding a new icon to our ratings arsenal. We use fallacy icons and descriptions from yourlogicalfallacyis.com because that site did a great deal of good work designing fallacy icons—work we’d have ended up doing otherwise. Yourlogicalfallacyis.com also provides simplified descriptions of the fallacies well-suited to readers new to analyzing rhetoric in terms of logic. We use a variety of…Read more

We’re close to making the site look like the way we planned it. We have revised the pages of posts to show only the beginning of stories and posts with a “Continue reading” option, making it much easier to see all the recent stories with just a bit of scrolling. The images accompanying the stories and posts give the site…Read more